The World According to Garp By John Irving Vintage Canada 640 pp; $22

A little over 40 years ago, some self-loathing literary somebody walked into the Dutton publishing boardroom with an early manuscript of John Irving’s fourth book in hand. If that doesn’t sound like the beginning of a very funny story, I’d recommend you read the novel (or its synopsis) and start again.

Three books under his belt, but unhappy with the press Random House was giving him, Irving decided to ditch a sure bet for someone smaller, offering The World According to Garp to E.P. Dutton & Co. (small then, now a Penguin Random House subsidiary, so ha-ha I suppose) instead. It’s a story you’ve heard before – Decca didn’t like The Beatles; J.K. Rowling has made something of a shrine to her own numerous rejection letters – but a fun story regardless, and in its spunky, stick-it-to-the-man sort of way, perfectly fitting for T.S. Garp himself.

The World According to Garp.File

So back to the pitch: let’s steal a moment to think on just how the hell a book like Garp might possibly be sold through a meeting with the suits. At risk of wild assumption, I can’t help imagining at least a few snippets for fun: Jenny’s character sketch interrupted by someone flagging a fact-check on the finer points of autonomic male arousal; another poor soul pitching the book’s other books, the ones Garp wrote, that appear intermittently throughout.

It seems worth observing that some of the most compelling bestsellers penned in the last 50 years are similarly impossible to imagine being sold at all. Fifteen Dogs, for instance (“Yes, but these ones can speak”); Lolita, further back, which I’ll leave you to imagine for yourself – two brief examples plucked from a sprawling bounty of seminal works united in both their brilliance and stunning challenge to pitch succinctly.

Anyway, no matter what did or did not happen in that Dutton boardroom in the mid-’70s, it worked. Irving inked a deal that would soon make his signature scrawl an autograph instead.

None of this is to say that Garp, according to the world, is entirely great. The book begins with a strange, if somewhat horrifying, sexually explicit scene and tumbles up or down from there, depending whom you ask. There are things true about The World According to Garp that are true about Irving either way: it is unapologetically verbose – Irving being both shameless and self-assured in this regard; and while I cannot speak for the state of Irving’s personal situation, Garp is ballsy. (And I mean ballsy. To the wallsy, even.)

Still, The World According to Garp is, to me, the best-written example of whatever elusive literary quality makes a human being capable of sobbing and laughing simultaneously. Those are each extraordinarily difficult emotions to elicit; to do so in tandem is remarkable, but requires the kind of evocation that critics might call outright provocation instead. They wouldn’t be wrong, really, but such is the way of both writers at play in The World According to Garp.

Absurd, asinine, amusing: no matter the assessment you offer this book, 40 years after its release, our world has changed, and with it, somehow, so has Garp’s. There’s prescience in considering Jenny’s story alongside debates on maternity and womanhood today, and Garp might well teach us a thing or two about tolerance, intolerance, and how two such opposite things can be mistaken for one another in modern life.

It’s a little dramatic, if not impossible, to call any book timeless. Nothing measures longevity like the endless vacuum of forever and nothing’s ever sure, but whatever happened those years ago at Dutton – magic or madness or neither or both – I’m willing to chance that bet and call Irving’s classic a treasure beyond scope.